The Origin of Spirituality—the Experience of “the Gods”

An Integrated View

THE COMING INTERSPIRITUAL AGE PROPOSES A SYNTHESIS CONSISTENT WITH MODERN BRAIN/MIND STUDIES

“While acknowledging an early pre-rational period and the subsequent periods dominated by rationalism and materialism, they suggest that both ways of knowing are important to our future and advise the need for a post-rational discussion that will develop such a synthesis. Interspirituality and the integralists identify the current era as precisely the time for a more holistic and integrative approach.”

[Read TCIA’s exciting synthesis of the pioneering work of Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, the general anthropological data, and modern understandings of spirituality]

THE GREAT ADVANCES OF HUMAN HISTORY

Let’s Eat: Farming Is Invented

Our Heritage from these Early Eras

The Second Great Advance: from Towns to Cities and Empires

The Emergence of the God-Kings

The Transition from God-Kings to Totalitarian Empires

The Epoch of Totalitarian Empires

Patriotism Is Born

UNDERSTANDING HISTORY AS EVOLVING AND DEVELOPMENTAL

THE COMING INTERSPIRITUAL AGE divides history into “Seven Advances” paralleling those used in Integral and Spiral Dynamics. Particularly stressed are (1) the details of the patterns of human behavior that developed and (2) what kinds of negative behaviors became embedded in humanity which must be addressed now by the unfolding integrative, holistic and interspiritual epochs.

Questions that might interest you are “Where did patriotism come from?”, “How did the ethics of spirituality get hijacked into the excesses of some organized religions?” “Will it always have to be this way?”

[Read more on the entire sweep of history and its meanings and patterns in TCIA]

The Great Religions Arise

ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT ALL THE GREAT RELIGIONS OF TODAY AROSE AT NEARLY THE SAME TIME FROM AMIDST 70 CENTURIES OF TOTALITARIANISM

“Ironically, history shows that within these rigid states, the effect of specialization and the creation of leisure (for some) led to pivotal advances in human thinking and technology. The existential angst that affected the masses led others to seek fresh answers in reflection and introspection, resulting in the birth of the great religions and philosophies that still compel much of the world today. Thus the epoch of Totalitarianism became the Axial Age, which birthed the bases of many of the world’s current philosophies and religions.”

[Read more in TCIA about how the actions of the human heart, in the midst of centuries of totalitarian states, fostered the arising of the world’s current great religions and ethical systems]

Advances in Thinking Foreshadow a New Epoch

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ALSO EMERGED FROM THE CENTURIES OF TOTALITARIANISM

“Just as peculiar as its effects on religion and thought, the crucible of the Totalitarian Age was also the wellspring for literary, mathematical, and scientific advances, reflecting the paradox of rigid social structures that bequeathed to some the climate for reflection and innovation. The astounding results set the stage for the advancement of science and technology.”

[Was history ‘rigged’ to develop science and technology in the totalitarian period only to have it find is greatest usefulness in serving a future integrative, holistic and interspiritual age? read more in TCIA]

THE DAWN OF THE RATIONAL EPOCH

Authoritarianism Breaks Down

A Global Plague Spurs a Renaissance in Consciousness

From Renaissance to European Enlightenment

Consciousness in the Renaissance and European Enlightenment

Today’s Heritage from the Rational Epoch

THE RATIONAL MIND DEVELOPS AND BRINGS BLESSINGS– ALONG WITH NEW PROBLEMS

“Around 1,000 CE, the social fabric of the authoritarian empires began to unravel, propelled ironically by the cumulative result of subcultures and social opportunities their own success had created—niches for art, creative thought, and a growing sense of individuality.

Encounter and clash between magical and rational worldviews were ongoing, of course, continuing to the present. Indeed, a major challenge for the coming Interspiritual Age will be to skillfully balance our experiences from the subjective internal realm with our knowledge from the objective external realms such as science and technology. From 1,000 CE, the next millennium was to experience a seesawing—and at times more of a roller coaster ride—between these extremes.”

[Read more in TCIA about how the rational mind arose, and its ongoing difficulties in working together with our heritage of the magic-mythic. Can these be united for a positive human future?]

“…the movement of rationalism got underway across Europe through the expanding university systems, bringing back the great Greek, Roman and Arabic scholars…embracing all aspects of intellectual inquiry and art, foreshadowing the scientific method. …This would lead to a revolution. From a world that had relied on the “say” of the religious priesthood, the new scholastic order emphasized empirical evidence, reason, and the study and comparison of original texts of many languages. This representational paradigm was to remain dominant until, in the 20th century, it became apparent that its capacities, based mostly on external objective knowing, may be inadequate for upholding a world that’s once again teetering.”

[Read more in TCIA about how today’s world situation is demanding a elegant integrations of all of our humans ways of knowing]

“Although the rational paradigm produced a bounty for our species, the limitation of inquiry to that which is seeable, touchable, and testable severely limited our ability to understand far more dynamic aspects of reality. This is the root of the lament, “We have so much advanced technology, yet we can’t get along with each other.” A chasm developed between the rational lens and the spiritual lens that remains today, prompting the question of whether a later integrative epoch can break the stalemate.”

[Read more in TCIA about the challenge of this integration and our future]

THE COMING OF WORLDWIDE CIVILIZATION

The Beginning of Modernism

Competition Leads to Calamity: the World Wars

A World Pluralism Emerges

Beginning of the Integrative Epoch

Cold War, Space Race, and Culture War

East-West Spiritual Cross-Pollination

Fifth Great Advance: Automation and the Emerging Dream of Holism

Holism and Interspirituality

THE POST WORLD WAR ERA CREATED A COSMOPOLITAN WORLD, SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE RELIGIONS TO EMBRACE A UNIVERSAL MESSAGE

“In charting the course of history, developmentalist and integral thinkers often divide their epochs of development into two tiers. The first represents epochs still invested primarily in human subsistence, bequeathing to humanity a reasonably comfortable lifestyle on a worldwide scale. This has been a characteristic of all the epochs thus far. The second tier acknowledges the emergence of a standard of living on a worldwide scale sufficiently comfortable to allow for the cultivation of the kind of humane values and vision that herald the Interspiritual Age.”

“The darker underbelly of the emergent cosmopolitan world involved competition for power and resources directly related to the ethos of the epoch of reason that preceded it. During this period, marked by the latent violent behavior of the era of the local and regional God-King and the authoritarian era of towns and cities, humanity reaped the whirlwind in global competition for political power and economic dominance, as there emerged another historic faceoff in the evolving human consciousness—the question of what comprises political, economic, and social greatness…. and the World Wars…”

“The cruel lessons or World War II taught much of the world there had to be a better way of competing and settling scores. The result was a new world culture of treaties and agreements. The United Nations formed in 1945, followed by world courts and organizations equipped to deal with matters ranging from trade to humans rights. These signaled a consciousness of world pluralism and the desire for peaceful coexistence among nations, allowing for progress and development uninterrupted by war, other than limited regional wars. Though many nations were still ruled by authoritarian regimes, a new diplomatic and pluralistic landscape had emerged. “

[Read in TCIA about how these global shifts affected religion and spirituality and set the stage for the current challenge of the world religions to address a universal experience and message]

THE FIELD

SCIENCE PROCLAIMS “UNDERSTANDING CONSCIOUSNESS” IS THE NEXT FRONTIER

“Appearing together a few years ago on the television talk show Charlie Rose, the co-discoverer of DNA, Dr James Watson, and the father of sociobiology, Harvard’s Dr E. O. Wilson, were asked the following question: If the discovery of DNA defined the current scientific era, what would define the next era? They both agreed that it would be an understanding of consciousness. The same prediction has been made by Britain’s pioneer of the new physics, Roger Penrose, along with one of the founders of string theory, Nobel laureate David Gross.”

[Read more in TCIA about the exciting commitment of science to understanding consciousness and the challenge its presents for a holistic and global vision for humanity]

Disagreement about Consciousness

Two Different Ideas

The Great “Pass Around”

The Philosophical Debate

THE STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND CONSCIOUSNESS

“Since at least the Renaissance, the rational lens of science and the magic-mythic lens that underpins most of religion and spirituality have been on separate paths. Worldwide, they have developed into two coexisting but fundamentally different cultures of knowledge….

It isn’t that conventional psychology hasn’t known about the experience of unity consciousness. Sigmund Freud referred to the feeling of unity with everything as the “oceanic experience.” However, the psychology of modernism opted out of investigating it, noting (as did Freud) that there was probably no physical basis for it that could be tested….

It’s almost a cliché in the emerging field of scientific consciousness studies to refer to the history of science and the question of consciousness as “the great pass around….

The emerging idea of a quantum reality, with a continuum between the infinitesimally large and the infinitesimally small, has changed the context of the discussion. The world’s spiritual traditions have assumed for centuries that consciousness is a collective field, including living and non-living things, whereas from a traditional scientific point of view consciousness isn’t a collective phenomenon and has a questionable, if any, interrelationship with the wider reality around it. As far as science is generally concerned, consciousness is an emergent quality of individual physical bodies….

However, today, exciting new proposals are being made in science….”

[Read in detail in TCIA about the struggle to understand consciousness and the new advances in science that are proposing ideas very similar to those of the Great Wisdom Traditions]

What Is Consciousness?

CURRENTLY, COSMOLOGY AND CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES HAVE SOME DISAGREEMENTS

“Surprising at it might seem, the question of what consciousness is shares much with the question of what space is.”

[read in detail in TCIA about why science has been OK about taking “space” for granted but not “consciousness”]

Changes in Scientific Thinking

The Qualities of Consciousness

Definitions of Consciousness

ADVANCES IN SCIENTIFIC THINKING HAVE ALLOWED CREATIVE NEW VIEWS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

“The field of scientific consciousness studies has only been around since the 1980s. The two major players have been a revolution in scientific philosophy in the 1970s and 80s, arising primarily from the work of scientific philosopher Sir Karl Popper, and the gradual paradigm shift in science away form pure materialism….

If there is ongoing development of increasingly more spacious mind, and the ethical and cognitive skill sets that accompany it, this fits the traits often associated by spirituality with persons of higher consciousness.”

[Read in TCIA about science’s modern definitions of consciousness that parallel those of the Great Wisdom Traditions. Read TCIA’s summaries from the work of major scholars like Sir John Eccles, and Dr. Julian Jaynes and Dr. Bernard Baars, opening new parallel understandings between science’s understanding and spirituality’s]

TAKING SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES SERIOUSLY

THE IDEOSYNCRATIC NATURE OF WHAT HUMAN’S BELIEVE

“We often assume that the truths science has discovered and the tenants taught by specific religions dominate the view of the earth’s 7 billion humans. The facts are quite the opposite. We have seen that some 70% of the earth’s population has a non-scientific worldview. While 85% are at least culturally associated with a particular religion, only 35% say they are active in the religions of their culture, while 65% claim they don’t believe in any religion at all. This suggests that the vast majority of the world’s 7 billion people really have no specific view of reality….

[Read more in TCIA about how we can get a testable handle on the many varied things humans report they have experienced]

Why People Believe What They Believe

THINGS BELIEVED TO BE TRUE MIGHT AS WELL BE?

“What people believe seems to be the platform on which our world is broadly built.”

[Explore in TCIA this enigma of what people believe and what is actually most likely true]

What People Say They Have Experienced

CONTEXT AND BELIEF

“People tend to report things in the context of the culture of their time. Before people began reporting night visits and abductions by space aliens in modern times, they described extremely similar occurrences in medieval times, except that the culprits back then were malevolent spirits bearing the common names of their time. No matter how many people report seeing UFOs, we are all familiar with the controversy of whether UFOs can be considered credible….

Of course, underlying this entire predicament is the fact that all reports of human experience, no matter whether the phenomena reported turns out to be “real” or not, are ultimately an experience in consciousness….”

[See extensive statistics in TCIA about what people say they have experienced; inquire further about the bottom line re: “reality”. Is there one?]

Religion and Spirituality’s Common Ground on Consciousness

SPIRITUALITY’S VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS

“Nearly all the world’s contemplative and mystical traditions acknowledge that phenomena such as thoughts, feelings, and emotions arise in consciousness yet are distinct from it. This is what leads to narratives about the everlasting and imperishable nature of “soul,” often identified as consciousness itself. This view of consciousness is what accounts for the overriding historical spiritual view that consciousness is a shared collective field involving all things, within which some things, such as fully conscious intelligent life, are more actively involved in sentient interactions.

Each of the world’s religious or spiritual traditions has emphasized particular elemental aspects of consciousness, which has given the appearance that their views differ. In reality the different traditions have simply spotlighted particular aspects—much like the millennial story of the blindfolded men touching an elephant and each trying to describe it.”

[Explore the universality of spirituality’s view of consciousness further in TCIA]

The Source of Division

WHAT IF SCIENTISTS FOUGHT THE WAY THE RELIGION’S OFTEN DO?

“When particular religions or spiritual traditions have emphasized either transcendence or immanence, schisms have tended to result, subdividing the world’s religions into myriad traditions and sects. This is the underlying problem that interspirituality seeks to address….

It’s as if physicists were to divide into conflicting factions, arguing over whether light is a wave or a particle, when quantum theory allows it to be both.”

[Read in TCIA about how science is ahead of religion when it comes to “letting both sides be true”]

The Spiritual Experience of Consciousness

PEOPLE CONTINUE TO HAVE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES NO MATTER WHAT SCIENCE SAYS, OR EVEN GOVERNMENTS MAKING THEM ILLEGAL

“Why does the spiritual view of consciousness continue to arise even in a world where most of science insists that such a view is primitive superstition? Why do humans continue to read their qualia—their “raw feel”—in ways that are often more compelling to them than the objective information science has offered?”

“When we speak of the world’s mystical literature…. We are speaking of the thousands of volumes of the classical spiritual literature by the sages and saints across the world’s myriad spiritual traditions—literature that’s superbly crafted, eloquent, and deeply compelling. The difficulty is that much of this literature hasn’t always been understood. In fact it has been terribly misunderstood, frequently interpreted through the eyes of strict religious belief rather than the experiential reality that underlies it.”

[Read more in TCIA now neither science or governments who make religion illegal have been able to stop spiritual experience]

The Genie in the Icebox

THE DILEMA OF MYSTICAL, SPIRITUAL AND PARANORMAL EXPERIENCES

…science says spiritual people claim: “There is a genie in my icebox. He is really there, believe me….”
Much of consciousness-related study comes down to what humans report. The reality of the presence of the genie in the icebox appears to teeter on this fulcrum. If it can’t be photographed, recorded, or in some other way verified, belief in its existence is dependent on whether the “raw feel” of the experience is compelling.”

[Explore the paradox of whether such experiences are “real” in TCIA]

Experience Always Seems to Rule

“I KNOW WHAT I SAW”

“In the enigma of the genie in the icebox, there’s a further rub. From statistics on reports by real people, individuals who end up departing from the view that consciousness resides only in our physical apparatus do so because of something that has happened in their individual experience. This is particularly the case when the individual is a scientist.”

[Read in TCIA how it is wishful thinking to imagine these experiences will disappear in humans; rather, we have to understand what they are in consciousness and how these are significant in our modern age]

SCIENTIFIC CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

CAN CONSCIOSNESS BE UNDERSTOOD SIMILARLY BY BOTH SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY?

“Whether waking or dreaming, consciousness is experienced by all as phenomena that arise in the brain—in the form of thoughts, sensing, messages, pictures, emotions, and so on— then fade into the background only to be replaced by other phenomena. This day-to-day, common sense landscape of consciousness parallels the simplest concept of consciousness in the Wisdom Traditions— ….”

[Read more at TCIA about how we are moving toward an understanding of consciousness that can involve both scientific knowledge and the traditions of wisdom spirituality]

Quantum Ideas of Consciousness

THE PARADOXICAL WORLDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM PHYSICS

“The important frontier opened by the scientific study of consciousness is the relationship of consciousness to the understanding of quantum fields and electromagnetic fields from the point of view of the new physics. Quantum theory is a dynamic view that allows paradoxical phenomena to be in interplay,…”

[Read more in TCIA about how quantum, electromagnetic and other explanations of consciousness begin to open doors for a scientific understanding of consciousness and includes the phenomena of spirituality]

The Future of Consciousness

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF BOTH SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY EXPLORING HOW CONSCIOUSNESS WORKS?

“Two decades ago, probably no one would have imagined scientists would agree that understanding consciousness would define the next scientific era.

…this understanding parallels the unfolding of the Integrative and Holistic eras of history, as well as the predictions by philosophers of science that science would adopt a view consistent with reality as a unified whole.

History shows that new skill sets, once innovated, spread through humanity with breathtaking speed…..

The point is that human skill sets related to cognitive skills, and human worldviews populate at a far faster pace than purely physical evolution. The factors that drive them also fluctuate wildly….

Our view is that consciousness will continue to expand as it has in the past, but at a faster pace. This will be particularly driven by the relationship of new knowledge and attendant skill sets, with a trend toward a more-spacious and creative mind, along with the skills that accompany such an expansion.”

[Read the details at TCIA about how this expansion of consciousness and skill sets seen in cognitive and brain/mind studies predicts the possibility of a dynamic future general consciousness for our species—deeply comprehending the profound interconnection of all things—and representing the best of historical views of the Great Wisdom Traditions]

THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

SIX-SEVENTHS OF WORLD CITIZENS BELIEVE IN A SPIRIT REALM, BUT IS IT REAL?

“Worldwide, nearly 6 billion of our planet’s more than 7 billion inhabitants believe in some kind of a spirit realm. The idea that this view is simply going to go away as we move into the Third Millennium is wishful thinking. So, what is the spirit world and what is the heritage it brings from our planet’s history to an uncertain future?”

[Explore in TCIA the incredible breadth of our species’ narratives about a supposed “spirit realm” and what these may mean, or not]

The Historical Breadth of Spirit World Experience

NARRATIVES ABOUT A SPIRIT REALM HAVE ACTUALLY INCREASED AND COMPLEXIFIED OVER TIME

“Virtually every modern culture is underpinned by enigmatic narratives of the spirit realm. … and yet, with ongoing development of human civilization, the notion of spirit realms only increased in complexity.”

[Follow in TCIA the development and complexification of our specie’s views of its experience of a spirit world]

The Spirit Realms Become Divided as Heaven and Hell

WHERE DID THE IDEAS OF HEAVEN AND HELL COME FROM?

“….what better way to enforce the primacy of your social construct and religious beliefs than to make them matters of salvation or damnation?”

[Find out in TCIA how the idea of “heaven” and “hell” came about]

Ancient Notions Persist into the Modern Day

A LONG, LONG HISTORY OF REPORTS BUT WHAT DO THEY MEAN?

“By the 19th and 20th centuries, the vast literature of Theosophy had emerged, seeking to meld the mystical notions of the Great Wisdom Traditions (particularly those of the East) with 19th century science. Famous Theosophists such as H. P. Blavatsky and C. W. Leadbeater described the spirit spheres and zones in great detail.”

[Explore in TCIA the range of narratives about the spirit realms and paranormal events and reassess your own opinions]